Child’s Play

“Breaking Bad” ’s bad dad.

“Breaking Bad” is a strange kind of must-watch: a show you dread and crave at once.Credit Illustration by Ben Kirchner

When the showrunner Vince Gilligan pitched “Breaking Bad” to AMC, he presented a mission statement, which amounted to a monumental spoiler: he would turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. The show’s protagonist was Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher who had a wife, a disabled teen-age son, and a baby on the way. Given a diagnosis of late-stage lung cancer, Walt took up cooking meth to build a nest egg and, later on, to pay his medical bills. When faced with the dilemma of whether to kill a menacing thug, he scribbled down a panicked moral calculus. Con: “MURDER IS WRONG!” Pro: “He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go.”

Ah, those were the days. Nobody could fault Walt when he strangled Krazy-8 with a bicycle lock, only two hours into the series. If television shows have conversion moments, that was mine. This was back in the chaotic, improvisatory days of Walt’s entry into the drug business, when the acid he’d intended to dissolve a tattooed corpse ended up eating right through a bathtub, so that the “raspberry slushie” of those human remains seemed as though it might leave a stain on the whole world. In a way, it has. Each season, Walt has made far less justifiable choices, each one changing him, with a throb of arrogance here, a swell of egotism there. We’re deep in the Scarface stage; the hero of the show is now its villain. There are only ten episodes left, eight of them due next summer, a welcome deadline that has allowed Gilligan to shape his ending without the vamping that mars so many multi-season dramas. But, even if his show ends brilliantly, he’s already told us that it won’t end well.

Walt hasn’t been the only one making choices, of course; the audience has, too, particularly the choice to keep tuning in. “Breaking Bad” is an explicitly addictive series, full of cliffhangers, with a visual flair that is rare for television. (Its directors this season have included the independent-film auteur Rian Johnson.) At once humane and nastily funny, it is full of indelible characters, such as Jesse, Walt’s student turned tragic dupe, and Hank, Walt’s blustery brother-in-law, who works for the D.E.A. And yet, for all the show’s pleasures, its themes can be irredeemably grim, particularly now that the crutch of our sympathy for Walt has been yanked away. Each new episode arrives fraught with foreshadowing, with betrayal on the way—we know what has to happen, but not how. The show has shed its original skin, that of the antihero drama, in which we root for a bad boy in spite of ourselves. Instead, it’s more like the late seasons of “The Sopranos,” the first show that dared to punish its audience for loving a monster. This makes “Breaking Bad” a radical type of television, and also a very strange kind of must-watch: a show that you dread and crave at the same time.

Last season ended with a cathartic payoff, as Walt outsmarted, then murdered, his enemy, Gus, the leader of an internationally connected drug cartel. Walt could have left the criminal life, but, as usual, he chose to continue. (Call him Macmeth: he’s stepped in blood so far, etc.) In this season’s early episodes, Walt ramped up a new operation: he tugged his old partners (Jesse and Gus’s enforcer, Mike) back into the game; the team pulled off a caper with an electromagnet, wiping out evidence; and, finally, they came up with a plan to hide their activities beneath the tents of a pest-removal company. Such problem solving has always been one of the show’s great satisfactions, allowing “Breaking Bad” to feel as much like a how-to as a why-not-to. The neater the plotting, the more the audience can detach itself a bit—like Walt himself—and view events as a type of meta-puzzle: can the stakes rise even higher?

In the August 12th episode, as if to answer that question, a child was shot in the chest. It was the kicker to a sleek heist plot out of “Ocean’s Eleven,” as Walt and his team robbed a freight train of a valuable chemical. A henchman was set up, through sly narrative indirection, to look like a “redshirt” who might be sacrificed for the sake of the action. Instead, the redshirt pulled a gun, killing a boy who witnessed the crime, an act that struck many viewers as a brash perforation of the show’s moral fabric.

In an ordinary drama, this would be true: causing a child’s death is still the rare TV taboo, at least for those characters whose cause we are meant to be invested in. But “Breaking Bad” has always put children in danger, to the point that it’s practically the show’s trademark. Walt’s rationalization is that he is protecting his family, but his most memorable targets are other people’s children: first, Jesse’s junkie girlfriend, whose air-traffic-controller father ended up crashing a plane in his grief over her death from an overdose, and then, last season, Brock, the son of another of Jesse’s girlfriends. A video-game-loving five-year-old, Brock was the definition of collateral damage. Walt poisoned him so that he could frame his old boss for it, thus luring Jesse back as his partner, since he knew that Jesse would be horrified by anyone who would harm a child. When Brock was near death in the I.C.U., I spent hours arguing with friends about who was responsible. To my surprise, some of the most hard-core cynics thought it inconceivable that it could be Walt—that might make the show impossible to take, they said. But, of course, it did nothing of the sort. Once the truth came out, and Brock recovered, I read posts insisting that Walt was so discerning, so careful with the dosage, that Brock could never have died. The audience has been trained by cable television to react this way: to hate the nagging wives, the dumb civilians, who might sour the fun of masculine adventure. “Breaking Bad” increases that cognitive dissonance, turning some viewers into not merely fans but enablers.

In this year’s most frightening moment, Walt sat on a sofa and gazed down at Brock with measuring eyes. It had the air of a primal scene: the supervillain and his child victim. It also brought to mind the many children that Walt and his world have brushed up against, from Tomás, the eleven-year-old drug courier, to that child of feral junkies in Season 2, whose parents were Walt’s customers. From early on, Walt’s baby daughter, the smiling cherub Holly, has seemed to hover in the crosshairs. There’s a shooting gallery of others: Walt’s worshipful son, Walt, Jr.; Mike’s beloved granddaughter; the kids of Walt’s wife’s former lover; and, this season, the daughter of Lydia, the cartel’s newest and most unstable partner, a helicopter mom who’s lost a blade.

In this bloodthirsty atmosphere, Gilligan has made several clever gambits to keep the show watchable, including swivelling background characters into the spotlight, where they can absorb the sympathy we once extended to Walt. The grizzled ex-cop Mike, with his dry wisecracks and his Realpolitik masculinity, fulfills our antihero needs. Jesse, once a doofus, has become downright astute. In the fourth episode, Gilligan pushed Skyler, Walt’s wife, into the foreground, granting her strength and insight; in one gorgeous scene, this happened literally, as the camera swung from a closeup of Walt, with Skyler facing away behind him, to a shot of Skyler’s expression, which was at once devastated and contemptuous. As Walt yammered on, his wife stepped into their pool and drifted under, her hair spreading. The gesture looked like a suicide attempt, but it was a stratagem: a drama designed to get her sister to take the kids out of the house, so that she could talk to her husband alone.

As with many of the show’s psychological situations, Walt’s conflict with his wife is at once epic and ordinary, and it centers on the question that troubles many bad marriages: What would be best for the children? During their showdown, Walt lectured Skyler for feeling guilty about her role in his criminal enterprise, saying, “You did what you had to do to protect your family and, I’m sorry, that doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a human being.” It was Chicken Soup for the Sociopath Soul, like the noxious koans that Tony Soprano grew so fond of. But, unlike Carmela, Skyler called this what it was, a spin on “Shit happens.” In his insistence that he maintain complete control, Walt will not allow Skyler to send their kids away, or let her separate from him and keep the kids with her. He will not even admit that they are at risk. It’s the irresolvable irony of the character: Walt’s justification for every act is that he’s a great dad. But he’s a monster precisely because he’s so willing to place his kids in danger in order to prop up his self-image as a family man. “All I can do is wait,” Skyler tells him. “Wait for what?” Walt asks. “For the cancer to come back,” she replies.

The audience now waits along with Skyler, as the narrative builds toward a finale in which anything might happen, since there will be no need to keep us watching. (A baby might die, for instance, maybe by swallowing the ricin pellet that’s tucked away in the Whites’ home.) To escape this moral checkmate, Gilligan might shift yet another character into the foreground, revealing that the show is actually (as a friend suggested) a hero’s tale in disguise. In that version of “Breaking Bad,” the protagonist is not Walt but Hank, a man with no children. Despite injury and depression, Hank brings down a vast drug ring, even when he discovers that the kingpin is his own brother-in-law, a sneering brainiac who has always considered himself superior. But because Hank is decent, and the show is on the side of good, Hank triumphs. That ending would have the virtue of symmetry, and pleasure, and closure, and relief, for the suffering audience.

Right now, however, it’s easier to imagine someone innocent coming to harm. Early this season, Skyler wandered into the living room, only to find her husband watching TV with Walt, Jr., baby Holly cradled in his arms. “Say hello to my little friend!” Al Pacino shouted on the screen, spraying gunfire. Walt, Jr., laughed and said the line along with Pacino, grinning with excitement. “Everyone dies in this movie, don’t they?” Walt asked. The look in his wife’s eyes wasn’t anger, or even fear. It was dread. She’d seen that movie, after all. She knew how it ends. ♦